On Friday 11 May 2007 05:16:44 am Bob Mottram wrote: ... > But in practice it's difficult to do AI in an open source way, because > I've found that at least up until the present there have been very few > people who actually know anything about the algorithms involved and > can make a useful contribution. The typical case is that there are a > few folks who are enthusiastic but lack either the programming ability > or the background knowledge of AI techniques, or both. Just learning > about the history of AI in general so that you can recognise potential > dead-end approaches takes some investment of time and energy. > ...
It must be remembered that Open Source projects, at least the significant and successful ones, typically start around a core written by one brilliant individual (or very small group). Linus comes to mind, or ESR, or RMS. (Also think of Thomson, Kernaghan & Ritchie with C and the original Unix.) These were all brilliant programmers. http://www.catb.org/%7Eesr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html The innards of an OS -- scheduler, filesystem, device drivers -- are not the sort of thing that the average Joe Appcoder knows a lot about either. Most projects of that kind continue to have a small group of indispensable experts at their core. Given that, they can be as arcane as any project -- consider cryptography software -- and remember that many projects are started in universities as research software. Furthermore, there are a lot of parts available as open source that can be included in an AI project, from numerical algorithms to theorem provers. We don't have to invent it, or even in many cases rewrite it. I just have to know why I would want to take eigenvalues or solve a SAT problem, not how to do it. Thus Open Source allows the AI developer to work at level well above the raw metal. The 4.4bsd kernel was about 200k lines of code. Industry standard is about 20 lines per day per programmer. If you assume that an AI is the same complexity as an early Unix, you're talking 27 man-years. We could imagine that one or two really smart people were really productive (and also got the basic design right!) and could do half of something that size in a few years, and the rest could be filled in by the community. Linux 0.001 was in Aug 1991, Linux 1.0 in Mar 1994. Note that a proper AI will be a learning meachine. It's quite conceivable that the core could be fairly small by software standards, but that the baby AI would need to be "raised" -- something that could be done in great profusion and with great variety by an O.S.-like community. Josh ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
